Analysis on User Errors in Virtual Keyboards

Abstract

With the advancement of information and communication technology, the task of text composition is increasing exponentially. However, the text composition task in users' native languages remains an issue, particularly with QWERTY keyboard. As an alternative to this QWERTY keyboard, user interface designers advocate virtual keyboards. Nevertheless, designing an efficient and robust virtual keyboard becomes another issue. The traditional approach to measure the effectiveness of a virtual keyboard is the text entry rate. The user errors, which are very important, have been either grossly ignored or accomplished with ad-hoc user testing. In fact, user errors should be taken into account to evaluate a design along with text entry rate. This paper proposes an way to identify virtual keyboard design parameters which affect the user errors during text composition. Outcome of this research would be helpful to develop a computational model to predict user errors on the basis of virtual keyboard design parameters.